Since the INTO ballot opened yesterday, the Teaching Council have been mailbombing, emailing, tweeting, sending glossy newsletters and hosting fancy webinars in order to convince everyone that Droichead is great. One could look at it and think that this is highly unethical behaviour or, on the other hand, it could be seen as desperation.
Although the turnout was low at 23%, the new Teaching Council was elected this week. At primary level, around 7,500 teachers voted, which represents around 25% of all primary teachers. In any case, I was glad that most of the candidates who were elected went into the elections with a number of promises to reform the Teaching Council. There … Read more
With just a few days to go before the election, it’s sad to note that education hardly featured in any of the debates. If we value education so little in this country, there isn’t much hope that things will get better.
Every week ClassDojo run a chat based on some aspect of education under the hashtag #dojochateu. I type in my own thoughts to the questions that are asked and publish them on this blog. This week the topic was based on Parental Engagement. Q1 What works best for schools trying to increase family engagement? How do we … Read more
This year’s IPPN annual conference was more than a little bit political with no less than seven politicians taking to the stage over the two days. Every year I give a summary of what I got up to. I try to spend a good bit of time in the Expo and miss out on some … Read more
We got sent a really good summary of the Department of Education’s paper on School Autonomy. Also with many teachers, the author of the summary is very worried about many of the proposals. The Department is asking for submissions as part of a consultation (where have we heard that before?) Personally, I see this as … Read more
The IPPN conference is coming next week. The conference has seen a change in that the minister for education is going to be at the official opening of the conference rather than the morning after, which seems to be aimed at launching the various political parties’ education election manifestos. We’re also going to have to put … Read more
The INTO ballot is very odd. It’s about 6 years too late and only focuses on the problems that we had back then rather than all the problems they’ve allowed to happen since.
For all you ClassDojo users out there, the people behind ClassDojo are coming to Dublin on the 16th January. They’ll be taking over the Long Hall bar in Dublin from 5pm and there’s going to be loads of goodies and fellow ClassDojo folk to meet. If you’re interested in going along, here is a link to … Read more
2015, as always, has been a very busy year in primary education. Every year, we look back over some of our articles throughout the months to see how the year shaped out. The world of technology was a quiet enough place with very few new gadgets capturing the imaginations of teachers. 2015 seemed to be a … Read more